The current Wired magazine has a “Jargon Watch” article about a hot phrase, “Stochastic Terrorism:”
In 2011, after the shooting of US representative Gabby Giffords, a Daily Kos blog warned of a new threat the writer called stochastic terrorism: the use of mass media to incite attacks by random nut jobs—acts that are “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”
The term is in Dictionary.com and other reference works online.
As is often the case with all forms of terrorism, like suicide bombing and airplane hijackings, Palestinians are the innovators of this type of terrorism.
During the Oslo process in the 1990s, Israel insisted on a committee to monitor Palestinian media for incitement to terror, for precisely this reason – people could perform attacks or join terror groups based on what they read in their media.
The “lone wolf” attacks against Israeli Jews have ramped up in recent years, notably the “knife intifada” that started in 2015 with a wave of “random” stabbings and car rammings that were done by individuals. But the wave started shortly after Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas gave a speech where he said, “Al-Aqsa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet. We won’t allow them to do so and we will do whatever we can to defend Jerusalem.”
This was a call to violence where Abbas could claim that he was not directly inciting. But the effects could be predicted. And sure enough, the attacks came.
Similarly, a wave of violence in 2017 after Israel installed metal detectors around the Temple Mount in response to another terror attack was prompted by media coverage of the defensive measures.
Israel has been working hard to try to predict the unpredictable, by monitoring social media posts that often can indicate that a person is preparing an attack. The entire reason that they have to do this is because Palestinians are the world leaders in stochastic terrorism.
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